'Humpday' movie review: Two college buddies have a gay old time

Magnolia PicturesMark Duplass and Joshua Leonard star as reunited college friends in "Humpday."

"Humpday" Movie Review -- A few years ago, a handful of similar, low-budget films started appearing. They shared a loose collective nature to filmmaking and an even looser sense of camera focus and sound recording.

They were dubbed "mumblecore."

Humpday (R) Magnolia (94 min.) Directed by Lynn Shelton. With Mark Duplass, Joshua Leonard, Alycia Delmore. Now playing exclusively at the Angelika in New York.

Well, having done a number of relationship dramas, and even a slasher movie (remember "Baghead"?), the movement has finally grown to encompass a movie about sex films.
Call it "mumbleporn."

Of course, like its sister films, "Humpday" isn't so much about sex as it is about talking about sex. (The one thing the mumblers all do is talk. A lot. Usually while sitting on couches.) Any fan going with prurient hopes is going to be disappointed.

Actually, a lot of fans are going to be disappointed.

The movie is set in Seattle, where Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) live and are trying, a little too hard perhaps, to have a baby. In bounds Ben's old college friend, Andrew (Joshua Leonard), an aggressively self-identified bohemian who backpacks the Third World making art.

Andrew sees Ben, of course, as a boring, white-picket fence kind of sell-out. And while Ben protests the stereotyping, it's clear he's not completely in disagreement, and a little awed by his friend.

And so the pair, each one trying to outdo the other in outrageousness, announce that they're going to create truly transgressive art by making a porno, setting up a camera to film them having sex with each other. Whoever backs out first loses.

It's a bizarre spin on typical masculine one-upmanship: prove how macho you are by daring to have gay sex with me. And if there were a real writer behind this, it could have made for an extremely complicated and uncomfortable movie. (It's perfect Neil LaBute territory.)

Instead, the script was developed by the actors. It was shot in a way which encouraged constant improvisation. As a result, the story feels like an outline, and the film looks like a rehearsal.

Admittedly, the performances are very real. Duplass (a core mumblecore director) is completely natural as the easily led Ben. Leonard (from "The Blair Witch Project" which, in retrospect, might have been the proto-mumblecore movie) is similarly believable as the perpetually wandering, wondering Andrew.

But what we realize very early on is that Ben and Andrew are a couple of self-deluded jerks. While that may have been fun for Duplass and Leonard to "explore" as actors, as an audience it's dull as hell to watch.

It doesn't help, either, that sometimes it feels as if we're watching this through the dirty windshield of a moving car.

There are pointless jumpcuts, and several scenes in which the actors' lips don't synch up with their dialogue; the cinematographer often seems to be searching, unsuccessfully, for the actors' faces, and the soundtrack sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

Both actors work very hard at not showing how hard they're working, and the straightforward Delmore is a small relief as Anna, Ben's more-than-patient wife. Director Lynn Shelton is good at capturing the small pushes and pulls of embarrassment and desire, ego and awe.

But who wants to spend an hour-and-a-half with these overgrown adolescents, as they (quite literally) thump their chests like two warring gorillas? Who wants to even entertain the idea of possibly watching them have sex?

"Something just hit me," Ben says near the end. "I think we might be morons."
You think?

Stephen Whitty may be reached at swhitty@starledger.com or (212) 790-4435.